The original illustration was done in the style of children's books that I loved when I was growing up, or at least inspired by this style. Using Fresco on my iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil I created a watercolour and ink style illustration, with the colour going slightly outside the lines and a sketched and simple style.
To turn this into a Christmas card I removed the grass layer, added a white snow layer and the snowman. I kept to the original style and tried to keep the colours simple with some shading but nothing with too much detail so it maintained the original inspiration. I added an illustration of the family dog playing in the snow, using the pencil tool in the app to create the extra hair that makes him more distinctive as the specific dog.
When it was printed it did lose some of the detail with the dog, but I am happy with the overall result as I feel it stayed true to the original inspiration of the ink and watercolour images I grew up with and stayed simple enough but also has enough detail and colour to be eye catching and make the individual elements distinctive.
Each of these images was resized for Instagram and used as a social media post.